Two Sons. Two Very Different Baseball Plans. Here’s Why.

Scott here…

This fall, our two sons will have almost completely opposite baseball schedules. Holden will spend five days a week training at IMG Academy, where baseball will be built into the rhythm of his school day. Bennis, meanwhile, won’t be on a baseball team at all. We haven’t even decided exactly what his baseball will look like in the spring.

From the outside, those two decisions probably couldn’t look much more different. I also realize there’s an easy assumption someone could make about why. Holden is attending IMG specifically for baseball, which is obviously a significant commitment for our entire family. It would be reasonable to look at Bennis not joining a team this fall and assume we’re simply putting more of our time and energy into Holden’s baseball right now. But that’s not what happened.

We put a lot of thought into what this next year should look like for both boys, and we arrived at two very different answers because they need two very different things from us right now. That’s really the point. We’re not trying to create a baseball blueprint that works for both of our kids. We’re trying to make the best decision we can for the kid standing in front of us, based on what we know about him today.

And we’re only making that decision for a year.

I’ve come to appreciate that part more and more as a coach and a dad. Youth sports has a way of making every decision feel much bigger and more permanent than it actually is. The team you choose at 10 starts to feel connected to the team he’ll make at 12, which somehow feels connected to where he’ll play at 14, which before long has parents worrying about high school and college baseball when their kid hasn’t even hit puberty yet.

We’re trying not to do that.

We’re choosing what we believe is right for this season, knowing we’ll have more information a year from now. The boys will be different. Their bodies will be different. Their interests may be different. Their relationship with baseball may be different. We’ll know things then that we simply can’t know today.

For Holden, what we believe he needs right now is a much different ratio of training to competition.

He’s played a lot of baseball over the last several years. Rec baseball, All-Stars, travel baseball, national tournaments. Like a lot of kids who progress through competitive youth baseball, there have been stretches when the calendar becomes dominated by games. You practice during the week, maybe squeeze in some individual work, and then spend the weekend playing four or five games in a tournament. Do that often enough and you can accumulate an incredible number of game reps without necessarily accumulating the same amount of intentional training.

I think we sometimes confuse those two things in youth baseball.

Playing baseball and training for baseball aren’t the same thing. Games certainly have developmental value. Kids need to compete, make decisions at game speed, experience pressure, fail when the outcome matters and learn how to adjust. But eventually there has to be enough time between those games to actually work on the things the games are exposing.

That’s one of the things I’m most excited about with Holden’s year at IMG. In some ways, he’ll be doing more baseball than he ever has before. He’ll train five days a week as part of his school schedule. But he’ll actually be playing substantially fewer games, especially this fall. We’ve also made the decision that he won’t play on a separate travel team during the spring school season.

We’re essentially flipping the ratio he’s been accustomed to. Instead of playing a tremendous amount of baseball and fitting development around the games, the development becomes the foundation and the games become opportunities to test it.

For where Holden is right now, that makes sense to us.

And then there’s Bennis.

If we believed there were one correct path through youth baseball, the obvious thing would probably be to start recreating some version of what worked for his older brother. Find a competitive team in Florida. Get him into a training program. Fill the calendar. Keep moving.

But Bennis isn’t Holden, and this isn’t the year we believe he needs that.

He’ll still play baseball. We’ll go hit together, throw, get in the cages and work on things one-on-one. But I want those sessions to feel different for a while. I want there to be afternoons when I ask if he wants to go hit rather than telling him we have practice. I want him to have enough space that baseball can become something he chooses instead of something that simply appears on the family calendar every week.

We’re also going to play golf. He’ll try other things. I want him moving and competing and learning how to control his body without believing that every athletic experience has to somehow be optimized for baseball.

None of that feels like stepping backward to me. It feels like development.

That’s probably one of the biggest things I’ve learned through all of this: development doesn’t always mean playing more baseball.

For one of our sons this year, it means dramatically increasing the amount of intentional baseball training while decreasing the number of games he plays. For the other, it means taking organized competition almost completely off the table for a while, while still training, playing and giving him opportunities to become a better athlete.

The decisions look completely different. The thinking behind them is actually very similar.

We asked ourselves the same question about both boys: What does this kid need from us this year?

Not what team can he make. Not what opportunity can we find. Not what will other families his age be doing. And definitely not what decision gives us the most impressive answer when someone asks where he’s playing.

What does he need?

That’s a harder question than it sounds.

P.S. If the idea of really understanding the athlete in front of you has you thinking about your own kid a little differently, we’ve been working on something behind the scenes that goes much deeper into exactly that. We’re not quite ready to share everything yet, but if you’re curious, you can get a first look here: Learn more about what we’re building.